spooledUP7 said:
I have made it my mission to pester Adobe until they fix the Canvas size limit within Illustrator. It may have been a useful limit back in 1989, but it's completely and utterly irritating now.
Actually the current 227" X 227" max art board size in Illustrator only dates back to 2000 with the release of Adobe Illustrator 9. It was the first version of Illustrator built natively on PDF technology, which paired alongside the then-new Adobe InDesign page layout application. InDesign has the same max art board size. Previous Postscript-based versions of Illustrator had much smaller maximum art board sizes.
All sign making applications and vector drawing programs have their limits on art board sizes, level of zoom and a bunch of other things. None are limitless. There's all sorts of push and pull taking place when the layout size gets huge. Accuracy of object dimensions and coordinate position starts taking a hit. I remember CASmate getting really unstable if a layout included something huge like a building elevation going over 100 feet or more in length. Saving work frequently was a must. Crash messages like: "floating point: square root of negative integer" were frequent gotchas when working big.
CorelDRAW has a max art board size of 1800" X 1800" -but I can have a layout less than half that size and get hit with the pop up message: "this zoom has exceeded the boundaries of the drawing space; your window will be adjusted accordingly." CorelDRAW also won't let you enlarge type past a limit of 3000 points unless you convert the type to curves. I think Corel's larger art board limits it in other respects. In Illustrator you can numerically define object dimensions out to four decimal points. In CorelDRAW you can only go to 3. CMYK fill percentages in CorelDRAW are only in whole numbers whereas Illustrator edits color percentages out to two decimal points. The rival applications obviously have different math engines running under the hood.
Developers at Adobe are trying to figure out way how to increase the maximum art board size. So many people in graphics forums assume it's just easy to get past these limits. If that was the case the max art board sizes would have been increased a long time ago.
spooledUP7 said:
Back on topic, Illustrator is (like it or not) THE industry standard for vector design software and it is appalling to see Adobe ignore this basic and necessary application feature for over two decades. It makes zero sense from my perspective to limit the canvas size, and if there is a logical reason Adobe has yet to openly disclose so. I am sure there is something baked into the OG code that causes a black-hole to materialize but you would think after 20 plus years they would have ironed it out.
There has never been a truly singular industry standard application for vector graphics software, nothing like what Photoshop is to image editing and pixel-based art. Even when Adobe was catering only to Mac users a bunch of those Mac graphics people were opting for Aldus Freehand instead. Adobe was only able to eliminate Freehand by buying its parent company (Macromedia at the time). For better or worse CorelDRAW has stayed fairly entrenched on the Windows side. And now there are newcomers like Affinity Designer, Autodesk Graphic, etc.
Regarding Flexi, it has some decent design capabilities, but the real reason to have it is for driving sign making hardware. We have 3 licenses of it in our shop, but most of the actual design work is taking place first in CorelDRAW and/or Adobe Illustrator. Flexi has some basic short comings, like not supporting all the features of OpenType fonts.
Sandman said:
In my opinion the only reason Corel became so popular with sign makers was the ability to cut vinyl direct from Corel.
That reason could apply in the late 1990's and years afterward. If you look back to the late 1980's and early 1990's very little industry-specific sign making software was running on the Mac platform. This was during a critical time when sign shops were first adopting digital-based tools. The vast majority of it was running on either MS-DOS or Windows. I was using a DOS-based version of CASmate back in 1993 and cutting vinyl graphics on a Gerber Signmaker 4B. IIRC Scanvec didn't release a Windows version until 1994 or 1995.
Most sign shops needed some kind of mainstream desktop graphics software to pair up with the industry specific sign making software. Some of it was for extra functions and effects not found in the sign software. Sometimes the mainstream drawing app would do things (such as weld objects) better than the sign making applications. And then if it wasn't for those reasons it was for all the extra fonts and clip art.
For PC users back in the early 1990s CorelDRAW was the only credible choice available. Early versions of Adobe Illustrator were lousy. It was laughable just how primitive Adobe Illustrator 4 was compared to even CorelDRAW 3. The only reason why I bought my first version of Adobe Illustrator was that it was in a bundle with Adobe Photoshop 2.5; the bundle included a decent collection of Postscript fonts worth quite a lot of money on their own.
25 years ago Adobe pretended CorelDRAW and the PC platform didn't exist. They released Illustrator versions 5, 5.5 and 6 for the Mac platform. IIRC they released one of those versions for Silicon Graphix IRIX OS. That neglect allowed CorelDRAW to become the default vector drawing app for the Windows platform and got it even more firmly entrenched in the sign industry. During that time I started using Macromedia Freehand as a substitute for Illustrator, simply because they weren't playing favorites with OS platforms. Freehand paired up with Adobe Photoshop just as well (I could even copy/paste AICB vector paths from Freehand into Photoshop).
Johnny Best said:
Would love to see Coral make Mac friendly software but I won't hold my breath on that happening.
CorelDRAW 11 had single SKU boxes that included both Mac and Windows versions in the same set of installation discs.
Back then one could have thought at least some Mac users would like the news of another Windows-only application going Mac. Instead the Mac user base all but unanimously turned up their noses at CDR 11 due to its PC roots. I think very few of those users ever even tried the product. They just made assumptions and snap judgments. Corel got the message loud and clear. CorelDRAW 12 and all versions since then have been Windows-only.
People have been making requests for Mac versions of CorelDRAW for many years at the CorelDRAW forums. Sometimes they do so here too. I'm sure anyone working at Corel who was working there in the early 2000's might cringe when seeing those Mac platform requests.
